PeerWORKS and Project FUTRE earn Team Award for Excellence
PeerWORKS and Project FUTRE, two paraprofessional programs led by the University of Arizona Health Science’s Comprehensive Center for Pain & Addiction, received the 2024 UArizona Team Award for Excellence.
PeerWORKS and Project FUTRE are both workforce development programs that provide behavioral health training. PeerWORKS trains adults who are in recovery from substance use disorder or mental illness to serve as peer recovery support specialists for people experiencing substance use disorder or mental illness. Project FUTRE trains people from families where substance use disorders are present as parent and family support specialists.
The interdisciplinary team includes members from the College of Medicine – Tucson, the Department of Pharmacology, the Department of Family and Community Medicine (where the Workforce Development Program is housed), the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health and the Arizona Center for Rural Health.
Members of the PeerWORKS and Project FUTRE team accept the Team Award for Excellence.
Photo by Kate Gardiner, UArizona Health Sciences BioCommunications
“This team has accomplished amazing things during incredibly difficult times,” said Regents Professor Todd Vanderah, PhD, director of the Comprehensive Center for Pain & Addiction and head of the Department of Pharmacology at the College of Medicine – Tucson. “They created and launched two programs during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, wrote and implemented curricula, built relationships with partner organizations, and expanded their scope of service to reach across Arizona amidst school closures, remote work and numerous adversities.”
Alyssa R. Padilla, MPH, the center’s assistant director of operations, said PeerWORKS and Project FUTRE support Arizonans returning to the workforce or joining the workforce for the first time.
“We guide individuals in their recovery from opioid and other substance use disorders and promote healing for entire families,” Padilla said. “Our goal is to address intergenerational trauma and build long-term resilience in families and communities.”
Padilla said receiving the award presents “an opportunity to create awareness about these programs and their impacts and to honor the hard work of everyone both running the programs and participating in them. I’m honored to build programs and teams like Project FUTRE and PeerWORKS.The team appreciates the recognition for our hard work, and the award recognizes the commitment of the trainees and apprentices to these programs. They’re the core of what we do.”
Victoria Molina, an assistant trainer in the Workforce Development Program, said, “Our team is very enthusiastic about the work that we do. We’re also very supportive of each other as colleagues and work well together to get things done. Communication is very important to all of us, and we take care to communicate respectfully with each other and the people we train.”
Molina said that finishing the Project FUTRE training herself several years ago changed the course of her life. She has now been in her role for two years and facilitates recovery-oriented didactic and experiential training for individuals seeking certification and apprenticeships as recovery support specialists and parent and family support specialists.
“I came into this field not knowing much about behavioral health,” Molina said. “I have since learned a lot about myself, how to approach my own recovery, and how to take that and use it going forward.”
She said she appreciates that the programs use compassion to help people in recovery and their families. “I am doing a lot better today thanks to this program and I appreciated that I am on this team.”
A full listing of the PeerWORKS, Project FUTRE and project investigator team members can be found on the award announcement site.